In my final SXSW interview, I had a chance to catch up with SXSW Immersive Programmer Blake Kammerdiener to do a retrospective look at this year’s program, some of the challenges for VR exhibition, his design intentions for how to intermingle the technologists, storytellers, and musicians who attend SXSW, how there’s a larger music selection this year, the emerging mixed reality experiences that are starting to crop up, the range of unique haptic experiences from Symbiosis to In the Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, which is one of my personal favorites in the festival circuit over the last year, as well as some of his other personal highlights from the festival. We only had about an hour to cover as much as we could, and it would’ve taken 2-3 hours to do them all justice. Luckily, I recorded over dozens of hours of interviews with creators in addition to having had covered 9 of the experiences at previous conferences.
I’ll add a comprehensive list of experiences down below in case you’d like to unpack some of the experiences that you may have had at SXSW.